The Cases of Susan Dare (13 page)

“Yes,” said Dickenson.

“And the door to the office is just at right angles to it there in the foyer, isn’t it?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Then you must have seen anyone entering or leaving the theater?”

“Why, I—” His quick dark eyes swept around the circle and he said—“that’s what I thought when you first questioned me. But I suppose I could have been mistaken.”

The constable cleared his throat again and looked at Jim, who said:

“I hope you don’t mind letting me get this straight? You told the constable you arrived at the theater at about twenty minutes to eight?”

“Yes.”

“You had called a dress rehearsal at eight?”

“I had said make-up at eight sharp. Rehearsal at eight-fifteen.”

“Was it customary to make up for dress rehearsal?” asked Jim, Irish honey on his tongue. “I thought that was only to get used to properties—all that.”

“Well,” said the director hesitating, “it is. But you see—” he paused, and then said with abrupt candor—“but you know how it is with amateurs. They like the smell of grease paint.” Dickenson stopped rather short and said: “Are you conducting this inquiry or getting a story for your paper?”

Jim said: “You unlocked the theater when you arrived?”

“Certainly. That is, I unlocked that one door.”

“Who arrived next?”

“Jane—Mrs. Cholster, and—Brock. They came together.”

Jim turned to Jane Cholster.

“Mrs. Cholster, do you know of anything that was worrying your husband? Was he quite as usual tonight?”

“Quite,” said Jane Cholster steadily. “He was a little sleepy, owing to having been gardening most of the afternoon. If you are trying to make out that my husband had any enemies, you are wasting your time. He had none.”

The constable spoke suddenly. “Now, Mrs. Cholster,” he said, “you and Miss Adelaide, there, living so close to him all in the same house—and Mr. Remy the next-door neighbor—between you, you ought to be able to give some sort of helpful evidence. This murder had a motive. It wasn’t an accident. And it wasn’t robbery. Nothing’s been taken from Mr. Cholster. You’d ought to be more helpful, Mrs. Cholster.”

“
But I tell you
—” Jane paused to control the impatience in her voice—“I tell you there is nothing,” she said. “Nothing. He was in no quarrel. He had no enemies.”

“The village has it that he’s a rich man.”

“Not rich,” said Jane. “He was no millionaire.”

“Did he leave any insurance?”

“Really, Mr. Lambrikin,” said Jane, the dangerous light flaring in her eyes again. “You’ll have to ask our lawyer about that. I can tell you, however, that my husband was always very generous with me and with Adelaide. It is true that he controlled all the Cholster money—my money and Adelaide’s inheritance, as well as his own. But he gave us anything we wanted. His will is no secret either: our own money was to revert to each of us and to each of us half of Brock’s estate. I assure you that there is no motive for murder there. If either of us wanted money we had only to ask for it at any time.”

“After Mr. and Mrs. Cholster arrived at the theater, what happened? Did they stop to speak to you?” It was Jim again, all his Celtic grace so smoothly to the fore that even Dickenson did not question his right to inquire.

“They stopped there in the doorway, and we chatted a moment. Then they said they were going down to the dressing rooms to make up, and Brock said he’d decided it would change his appearance more to an audience of townspeople if he wore a beard, and he’d got one already made. He handed Mrs. Cholster his make-up box and cap, and she went on into the theater while Brock showed me the beard—it’s there on his chin now—and then he went on.”

“I arrived next,” said Tom Remy suddenly. “I stopped, too, and spoke to Dickie, and then went directly through the house—up those steps and, without even glancing out on the stage, to the dressing rooms. The stage was dark. And I do remember that the curtain was down.”

“Did you see the Cholsters downstairs?” asked the constable quickly.

“I saw Mrs. Cholster,” said Tom Remy slowly. “She stood there in her dressing-room door. I spoke to her a moment and went on to my own dressing room. But I do not believe that Mrs. Cholster left her dressing room at all until we heard Dickie shouting for us from up here.”

“Why do you think that?” said Jim.

“Because,” said Tom Remy, “I could hear her voice.”

“Her voice?” cried the constable. “You mean she was talking to somebody? That would be Mr. Cholster, then. Was that—”

“No,” said Jane. “I was not talking to my husband. I never saw him again alive after I left him at the door of the office back there.” She stopped—deliberately, Susan thought—after throwing out the word “office.” The constable’s eyes went to Dickenson, who looked suddenly white.

Jim said: “To whom were you talking, Mrs. Cholster?”

Susan caught a tiny flame in Jane’s eyes. She said: “I was rehearsing my lines.”

Dickenson had got his breath.

“If you think that I killed Brock and dragged him up here to the stage you are wrong. I couldn’t have lifted him. It’s physically impossible.”

“Maybe,” said the constable. “But as to that, I don’t know as any of you could have lifted him. Or struggled with him, for that matter. He was easy stronger than any one of you. Any one of you.” He looked speculative and added: “Of course, two of you—”

“The wound,” said Jim in a voice without any inflection at all, “was in the forehead. Somebody had to be very close to him. And directly in front of him. Therefore someone he knew and did not fear.”

Jane leaped to her feet. “How dare you say such things! It is not true.”

“Jane—Jane—” said Tom Remy, with again a guarded note of warning in his voice. “Look here, Constable, I am sure that Mrs. Cholster was in her dressing room downstairs from the time I arrived to the time we heard Dickie shouting for us here on the stage.”

“We ain’t saying Mrs. Cholster is the murderer,” said the constable. “But Brock Cholster’s dead, ain’t he? Now then, Dickenson, you claimed that you saw everybody that entered the theater tonight.”

“I thought so,” he said rapidly. “But now that I’ve had time to think of it I realize that someone might have entered without my knowledge—”

“You said you were in the office the whole time from your arrival till everybody was here. Who came last? Miss Adelaide?”

“Yes, Adelaide. Yes, I said that in the haste of the moment when you arrived, Constable. But now I realize that someone must have slipped past the office door when I wasn’t looking.

“And then slipped out again after he’d murdered Brock Cholster?” inquired the constable heavily.

“Exactly,” said Dickenson eagerly. “That’s what must have happened. There’s no other explanation.”

“It’s pretty late for it, Dickenson,” said the constable. “And it ain’t reasonable to suppose that you saw everybody else that entered the theater and were sitting right there by the door from the time you unlocked it until you locked it again, and yet the murderer got past you twice without your seeing him. No, it ain’t reasonable. Now, Miss Adelaide, what’s your story?”

“Why, I—I came in, as Dickie said. And I went along the aisle there at the side and up those steps—just as the others did, I suppose, and then immediately down to my dressing room. That’s all I know. That is, till I heard Dickie calling for us up here on the stage, and we all hurried upstairs and saw—” she gave a convulsive shudder and finished—“saw him.”

“Was the curtain up when you came along the aisle?”

She blinked, hesitated, and then was certain. “I don’t know. I really don’t know. I don’t remember it at all.”

“Was the stage dark?”

“Yes. Yes, it must have been.”

Jim coughed lightly, and the constable looked at him, and Jim said: “Odd that no one heard any noise—”

“Did anyone hear a noise?” asked the constable directly.

No one replied, and the small silence grew oppressive. Again Susan was acutely conscious of the empty waiting theater, of the spaces, of the shadows, of the empty passages and rooms below them. Behind them, of course, was the balcony set with its French doors, and wings jutting out that looked like brick walls with vines over them. She glanced up and over her shoulder into what she could see of the loft. It, too, was dim in spite of lights, and hung with great ghostly ropes that stretched hazily upward into darkness.

She wondered if anyone could conceal himself up there in the dim reaches of the loft, clinging somehow to perilous ropes, and decided that it was not possible. She did not, however, like those mysterious dark spaces above and out in the wings.

The constable sighed and said: “Mrs. Cholster, didn’t you hear anything?”

Jane Cholster moistened her lips.

“I heard nothing like—like a blow,” she said as if forcing out the words. “I did hear someone on the stage. Arranging it, I thought, and supposed it was Mr. Dickenson. I didn’t give it much attention.”

“Mr. Remy?”

“Why, I—I didn’t hear anything like a blow, either. Could we have heard that?”

The constable glanced toward the heap under its covering and said: “I think you could have heard it. Did you hear anyone on the stage?”

“I don’t know,” said Tom Remy. “I remember thinking that Dickie was getting the stage ready, but I don’t know why I thought that—must have heard some sound, I suppose. Certainly,” he added, as if making amends to Dickenson, “I had no reason to think it was Dickenson except that he usually arranged the stage for us. And it was only a vague recognition of someone moving about above us. Then there was, too, a sort of rumbling sound.”

“A rumbling sound—”

“That was the ventilator,” said Dickenson at once. “I had turned it on—the switch is in the office—to see how it worked. It’s a recent addition and wasn’t made for old theaters. It makes a lot of noise here. We can only use it between acts and when the theater is empty. But I was not arranging the stage.”

“What time was the ventilator going?”

“I don’t know exactly. Around eight, I suppose.”

“Did
you
hear anything? Anything besides the—ventilator?”

“No,” said Dickenson. “Nothing. But I’d like to know who put the curtain up.”

Again no one spoke, and again the old theater waited. Someone behind Susan sighed: it was the little deputy. Jane Cholster was biting her lips, and Adelaide was staring upward in her turn into the mysterious ghostly reaches of the fly loft. Tom Remy blew out beige smoke, and quite suddenly there was a small skittering sound. Though it was faint, everyone started.

Then Dickenson said softly: “Mice,” and Adelaide screamed raggedly but softly and pulled up her feet and jerked her skirt tighter over her legs.

Mere nerves, of course. They were all terribly aware, as Susan herself was aware, that murder had walked that stage.

And the murderer was still at large—or at least still undiscovered. Which of those taut, unrevealing faces concealed murder?

Or was it possible that the search of the theater had left some dark corner unseen?

“Then some time between ten minutes till eight and ten minutes after eight the murder occurred,” said the constable suddenly. “Did you say they were to put this stuff on their faces at eight, Dickenson?”

Dickenson shrugged.

“Oh—I said make-up at eight,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean that Brock Cholster went down to his dressing room at exactly eight and then came up here again.”

“But he was in his dressing room at some time,” pressed the constable.

“Must have been.”

“And he was murdered after he was made up?”

“Well, obviously. And obviously he wasn’t murdered in his dressing room. Nobody could have got him up that stairway.”

“When was your husband in his dressing room, Mrs. Cholster?”

“I—don’t know.”

“You didn’t hear him at all?”

“No.”

“But you know Mr. Remy was there?”

It was then that the storm growing behind Jane Cholster’s lambent eyes burst into fury. She rose with a lithe movement and faced the constable.

“Constable,” she said furiously. “This is an outrage. You are keeping us in this horrible place, frightening us—inquiring; and we have no recourse but to stay here and wait for the sheriff. But we can refuse to talk, and I do so now. I will not answer another question. And I will wait for the sheriff how and where I please.”

She whirled and walked off the stage, turning aside beyond the switchboard. They could hear her quick footsteps as she went down the steps leading to the outside aisle of the house.

“Hey, there,” cried the constable, standing. “You can’t leave.”

The trim dark figure did not turn. They watched as she coolly selected a seat and sat down in it, leaning her head on her hand.

Tom Remy, Adelaide, and Dickenson had risen, too, as if Jane’s action had inspired them also to defiance, and were drifting toward the wings, Adelaide supported solicitously by the sleek young director.

“Well, let ’em go,” said the constable to the deputy, who looked troubled. “Guess there’s nothing much to do but wait for the sheriff.”

“What do you think of it?” said Jim.

“Well,” said the constable, “looks very much as if the deed was done around eight o’clock. Probably between eight and eight-ten. I figure it took Mr. Cholster a few minutes to get that stuff on his face. Then for some reason he came back here on the stage. Mr. Remy and Mrs. Cholster sort of alibi each other, but alibis ain’t always certain. Miss Adelaide didn’t hardly have time to kill him without an awful lot of luck before this Dickenson fellow locked the door and came straight up to the stage. I figure it wasn’t more than a minute. I—”

“What’s that?” It was Dickenson beside them suddenly, and Jim said:

“The constable and I were just saying that you must have followed Miss Adelaide into the theater almost at once.”

“I did. I spoke to her, and she came on in, and I turned off the ventilator, locked the door, and followed.”

“She must have put on her make-up very quickly,” said Susan.

Dickenson’s quick dark eyes gave her a very sharp look.

“Why, yes, I suppose she was hurrying. Probably hadn’t finished when I found Cholster and called. If you’re figuring whether she had time to—to kill him and then get down to her dressing room and get make-up on, why she didn’t. And I realize that that leaves me the only one without an alibi; but I didn’t kill him.”